Congress Arms Trump With Sanctions, Then Drops His War
This week Congress did two things that look contradictory but line up perfectly once you follow the power. The House passed a sweeping sanctions bill handing Donald Trump broad new authority to punish Russia and Iran, then sent it on to his desk for signature. At almost the same moment, the House took up, for the third time, a resolution meant to actually stop Trump from continuing to wage war on Iran without asking Congress first — and that resolution, unlike the sanctions bill, still has to survive the Senate, more than six months into the war it is meant to end.
The sanctions bill is named for the late South Carolina Republican Lindsey Graham, who championed it, and it does far more than sanction. It gives the president authority to impose tariffs on the top importers of Russian oil and natural gas, naming China and India directly, alongside other punishing measures against the Kremlin that Congress has now voted to put in Trump's hands. Dressed up as a Russia bill, what actually passed is a blank check to reorder global energy trade by presidential fiat.
Even inside the chamber that passed it, the unease was on the record. The act divided Democrats and Republicans, with some lawmakers warning the power it grants could just as easily be turned against US allies as against Moscow. That is the tell: a weapon built to discipline an adversary, handed to an executive with no requirement to use it that way, becomes a weapon to discipline anyone — trading partners, allies, whoever is inconvenient. Congress did not write a narrow punishment. It wrote itself out of the loop on how tariffs and sanctions get used against the rest of the world.
Compare that speed and unity of purpose to what happened to the actual constitutional brake on Trump's power: the war powers resolution on Iran. That measure exists to force the president to get congressional approval before he keeps a war going. The House has now passed some version of it three times, and it still needs the Senate, more than six months into a war being fought without that approval. Congress will hand the executive new economic weapons in an evening. It cannot make the Senate act on the one check the Constitution actually gives it over war itself.
The stakes are not abstract. Federal authorities have confirmed that a foreign actor compromised the network of two oil tankers bound for Texas in August — a reminder that the energy infrastructure this whole fight is being waged over is already a live target, not a hypothetical one. And this is a shooting war, not a diplomatic abstraction: leaked photos have shown extensive damage at US bases in the Gulf, including a severed radar jet, flattened trailers and severely damaged buildings, caused by Iranian strikes — the very war Congress has now voted three times to bring under its own control and still hasn't managed to.
And the world is watching the pattern, not just the press releases. A new global survey finds trust in both US and Chinese leadership sinking, and its commissioner said that when it comes to solutions to global problems, people are no longer asking what do the Americans think. That is what it looks like when a government keeps reaching for coercion — tariffs, sanctions, a war it won't submit for a real vote — instead of legitimacy. The sanctions bill goes to Trump's desk with his signature already assumed. The war powers resolution goes to a Senate under no obligation to even take it up. One of those outcomes was never really in doubt, and it was never the one that would have cost the administration anything.
Who pays for that asymmetry is not a mystery. It is Iranians living through a war Congress has voted three times to end and cannot make stick, it is the material reality behind photos of a severed radar jet and flattened trailers at US bases in the Gulf, it is workers and buyers in the countries named as targets of the next tariff round, and it is anyone counting on Congress to mean it when it claims a check on presidential war power still exists.